A new study suggests that the amount of water stored on land around the world—in soil, lakes, rivers, snow, etc.—has dropped by such steep levels that it may be irreversible, reports the Washington Post. "At first we thought, 'That's an error in the model,'" University of Melbourne hydrology professor Dongryeol RyuRyu tells the AP. But the new study in Science lays out the numbers: Earth's land lost about 2,614 gigatons of water from 2000 to 2016, with the loss most pronounced from 2000 to 2002 at 1,614 gigatons, per Australia's ABC News. To the researchers' surprise, that outpaces the amount lost by Greenland's melting glaciers.
"The rate of water dumping into the oceans was bigger from terrestrial water storage than from what we normally think of as the biggest source, which was the melting of Greenland," says co-author Clark Wilson of the University of Texas at Austin. That suggests the evaporation of moisture from soil is a bigger factor in rising sea levels than previously thought. One problem is that groundwater isn't recovering amid rising temperatures, with the frequency of severe droughts around the world accelerating. Even headline-making catastrophic floods don't seem to help. "It seems that lands lost their elasticity to recover the previous level," says Ryu. The researchers warn that fundamental changes in regard to water use, particularly in agriculture, are needed.
"There are long-term climate changes that have happened in the past and presumably could occur in the future that could reverse the trend described, but probably not in our lifetimes," says environmental science professor Katharine Jacobs of the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the study. "Because greenhouse gases will continue to cause global warming well into the future, the rate of evaporation and transpiration is not likely to reduce any time soon." (More climate change stories.)
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